This passage comes toward the end of the novel. It is somewhat
long so I recommend that you print it out. The set up: Randy Waterhouse
and Enoch Root discuss Greek mythology. In particular why Enoch's
amulet for the Societas Eruditorium has Athena on it.

"So what's your explanation of how
I recognized you?"

"I would argue that inside your mind was
some pattern of neurological activity that was not there before
you exchanged e-mail with me. The Root Representation. It is
not me. I'm this big slug of carbon and oxygen
and some other stuff on this cot right next to you. The Root
Rep, by contrast, is the think that you'll carry around in your
brain for the rest of your life, barring some kind of major neurological
insult, that your mind uses to represent me. When you think about
me, in other words, you're not thinking about me qua this big
slug of carbon, you are thinking about the Root Rep. Indeed,
some day you might get released from jail and run into someone
who would say, 'You know, I was in the Philippines once, running
around in boondocks, and I ran into this old fart who started
talking to me about Root Reps.' And by exchanging notes (as it
were) with this fellow you would be able to establish beyond
a reasonable doubt that the Root Rep in your brain and the Root
Rep in his brain were generated by the same actual slug of carbon
and oxygen and so on: me."

"And this has something to do, again,
with Athena?"

"If you think of the Greek gods as
real supernatural beings who lived on Mount Olympus, no. But
if you think of them as being in the same class of entities as
the Root Rep, which is to say, patterns of neurological activity
that the mind uses to represent things that it sees, or thinks
it sees, in the outside world, then yes. Suddenly, Greek gods
can be just as interesting and relevant as real people. Why?
Because, in the same way that you might one day encounter another
person with his own Root Rep so, if you were to have a conversation
with an ancient Greek person, and he started talking about Zeus,
you might - once you got over your initial feelings of superiority
-discover that you had some mental representations inside your
own mind that, though you didn't name them Zeus and didn't think
of them as a big hairy thunderbolt-hurdling son of a Titan, nonetheless
had been generated as a result of your interaction with entities
in the outside world that are the same as the ones that cause
the Zeus Representation to appear in the Greek's mind. And here
we could talk about the Plato Cave thing for a while - the Veg-O-Matic
of metaphors - it slices! It dices!"

"In which," Randy says, "the
actual entities in the real world are the three-dimensional,
real things that are casting the shadows, this Greek dude and
I are the wretches chained up looking as the shadows of those
things on the walls, and it's just the shape of the wall in from
of me is different from the shape of the wall in front of the
Grecian -"

"- so that given a shadow projected
on your wall is going to adopt a different shape from
the same shadow projected on his wall, where the different
wall-shapes here correspond to let's say your modern scientific
worldview versus his ancient pagan worldview."

"Yeah. That Plato's Cave metaphor."

At this very moment some wag of a prison
guard, out in the corridor, throws a switch that shuts off all
the lights. The only illumination now comes from the screensaver
on Randy's laptop, which is running animation of colliding galaxies.

"I think we can stipulate that the
wall in front of you, Randy, is considerably flatter and smoother,
i.e. it generally gives you a much more accurate shadow than
his wall, and yet it's clear he's capable of seeing the same
shadows and probably drawing some useful conclusions about the
shapes of the things that cast them."

"Okay. So the Athena that you honor on
your medallion isn't a supernatural being -"

"-who lives on a mountain in Greece, et
cetera, but rather whatever entity, pattern, trend, what-have-you
that, when perceived by ancient Greek people, and filtered through
their perceptual machinery and their pagan worldview, produced
the internal mental representation that they dubbed Athena. The
distinction being important because Athena-the supernatural-chick-with-the-helmet
is of course nonexistent, but 'Athena' the external-generator-of-the-internal-representation-dubbed-Athena-by-the-ancient-Greeks
must have existed back then, or if she existed back then,
the chances are excellent that she exists now, and if all that
is the case, then whatever ideas the ancient Greeks (who, though
utter shitheads in many ways, were terrifyingly intelligent people)
had about her are probably quite valid."

"Okay, but why Athena and not Demeter
or someone?"

"Well, it's a truism that you can't understand
a person without knowing something about her family background,
and so we have to do kind of a quick Cliff's Notes number on
the ancient Greek Theogony here. We start out with Chaos, which
is where all theogonies start, and which I like to think of as
a sea of white noise - totally random broadband static. And for
reasons that we don't really understand, certain polarities begin
to coalesce from this - Day, Night, Darkness, Light, Earth, Sea,.
Personally, I like to think of these as crystals - not in the
hippy-dippy California sense, but in the hardass technical sense
of resonators, that received certain channels buried in the static
of Chaos. At some point, out of certain incestuous couplings
among such entities, you get Titans. And it's arguably kind of
interesting to note that the Titans provide really the full compliment
of basic gods - you've got the sun god, Hyperion, and the ocean
god, Oceanus, and so on. But they all get overthrown in a power
struggle called the Titanmachia and replaced with new gods like
Apollo and Poseidon, who end up filling the same slots in the
organizational chart, as it were. Which is kind of interesting
in that it seems to tie in with the what I was saying about the
same entities or patterns persisting through time, but casting
slightly different shaped shadows for different people. Anyway,
so now we have the Gods of Olympus as we normally think of them:
Zeus, Hera and so on.
"A couple of basic observations about
these: first, they all, with one exception I'll get to soon,
were produced by some kind of sexual coupling, either Titan-Titaness
or God-Goddess or God-Nymph or God-Woman or basically Zeus and
whom- or whatever Zeus was fucking on any particular day. Which
brings me to the second basic observation, which is that the
Gods of Olympus are the most squalid and dysfunctional family
imaginable. And yet there is something about the motley asymmetry
of this pantheon that makes it more credible. Like the Periodic
Table of the Elements or the family tree of the elementary particles,
or just about any anatomical structure that you might pull up
out of a cadaver, it has enough pattern to give our minds something
to work on and yet irregularity that indicates some kind of organic
providence - you have a sun god and a moon goddess, for example,
which is all clean and symmetrical , and yet over here you have
Hera, who has no role whatsoever except to be a literal bitch
goddess, and then there is Dionysus who isn't even fully a god
- he's half human - but he gets to be in the Pantheon anyway
and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme
Court and found Bozo the Clown planted among the justices.
"Now what I am getting to here is that
Athena was exceptional in every way. To begin with she wasn't
created through sexual reproduction in any kind of normal sense;
she sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus. According to some
versions of the story, this happened after Zeus fucked Metis,
about whom we'll hear more in due course. Then he was warned
that Metis would later give birth to a son who would dethrone
him, and so he ate her, and later Athena came out of his head.
Whether you buy into Metis story or not, I think we still agree
that something peculiar was going on with the nativity of Athena.
She was also exceptional in that she did not participate in the
moral squalor of Olympus; she was a virgin."

"Aha! I knew that was a picture of a virgin
on your medallion."

"Yes, Randy, you do habea keen eye for virgins. Hephaestus
leg-fucked her once but did not achieve penetration. She's quite
important in the Odyssey, but there are really few myths,
in the usual sense of that term, that involve her. The one exception
really proves the rule: the story of Artachne. Arachne was a
superb weaver who became arrogant and began taking credit herself,
instead of attributing her talent to the gods. Arachne went so
far as to issue an open challenge to Athena, who was the goddess
of weaving, among other things.
"Now keep in mind that the typical Greek
myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding
his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on,
swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering
around in a daze, that god's wife or lover, in a jealous rage,
turns him - the helpless, innocent victim, that is - into let's
say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet
of plywood with a dish of turtle food just out of his reach and
leaves him out inthe sun forever to be repeatedly disemboweled
by army ants and stung by hornets or something. So if Arachne
had dissed anyone else in the Pantheon, she would have been just
a smoking hole in the ground before she knew what hit her.
"But in this case, Athena appeared to
her in the guise of an old-woman and recommended that she display
the proper humility. Arachne declined her advice. Finally Athena
revbealed herself as such an challenged Arachne to a weaving
contest, which you'll have to admit was uncommonly fair-minded
of her. And the interesting thing is that the contest turned
out to be a draw - Arachne really was just as good as Athena!
Only problem was that her weaving depicted the gods of Olympus
at their shepherd-raping, interspecies-fucking worst. This weaving
was simply a literal and accurate illustration of all those other
myths, which makes this into a sort of meta-myth. Athena flew
off the handle and whacked Arachne with her distaff, which might
seem kind of like a poor anger management until you consider
that during the struggle with the Giants, she wasted Enceladus
by dropping Sicily on him! The only effect was to cause Arachne
to recognize her own hubris, at which she became so ashamed that
she hanged herself. Athena then brought her back to life in the
form of a spider.
"So anyway, you probably learned in elementary
school that Athena wears a helmet, carries a shield called Aegis,
and is the goddess of war and of wisdom, as well as crafts -
such as the aforementioned weaving. Kind of an odd combination,
to say the least! Especially since Ares was supposed to be the
god of war and Hestia the goddess of home economics - why the
redundancy? But a lot's been screwed up in the translation. See,
the kind of wisdom we associate with old farts like yours truly,
and which I'm trying to impart to you here, Randy Waterhouse,
was called dike by the Greeks. That's not what
Athena was the goddess of! She was the goddess of metis,
which means cunning or craftiness, and which you'll recall was
the name of her mother in one version of the story. Interstingly
Metis (the personage, not the attribute) provided young Zeus
withthe potion that caused Cronus to vomit up all of the baby
gods he'd swallowed, setting the stage for the whole Titanomachia.
So now the connectionto crafts becomes obvious - crafts are just
the practical application of metis."

"I associate the word 'crafts' ith making
crappy belts and ashtrays in summer camp," Randy says. "I
mean, who wants to be the fucking goddess of macrame?"

"It's all bad translation. The word that
we use today, to mean the same thing, is really technology."

"Okay. Now we're getting somewhere."

"Instead of calling Athena the goddess
of war, wisdom, and macrame, then, we should say war and technology.
And here again, we have the problem of an overlap with the jurisdiction
of Ares, who's supposed to be the god of war. And let's just
say that Ares is a complete asshole. His personal aides are Fear
and Terror and sometimes Strife. He is constantly at odds with
Athena even though - mabe because - they are nominally
the god and goddess of the same thing - war. Heracles, who is
one of Athena's human proteges, physically wounds Ares on two
occasions, and even strips him of his weapons at one point! You
see the fascinating thing about Ares is that he's completely
incompetent. He's chained up by a couple of giants and imprisoned
ina bronze vessel for thirteen months. He's wounded by one of
Odysseus's drinking buddies during the Iliad. Athena knocks
him out with a rock at one point. When he's not making a complete
idiot of himself in battle, he's screwing every human female
he can get his hands on, and - get this - his sons are all what
we would today call serial killers. And so it seems very clear
to me that Ares really was the god of war as such an entity would
be recognized by people who were involved in wars all the time,
and had a really clear idea of just how stupid and ugly wars
are.
"Whereas Athena is famous for beingt he
backer if Odysseus, who, let's not forget, is the guy who comes
up with the idea for the Trojan Horse. Athena guides both Odysseus
and Heracles through their struggles, and although both of these
guys are excellent fighters, they win most of their battles through
cunning or (less prejoratively) metis. And although both
of them engage in violence pretty freely (Odysseus likes to call
himself "sacker of cities") it's clear that they are
being held up in opposition to the kind of mindless, raging violence
associated with Ares and his offspring - Heracles even personally
rids the world of a few of Ares's psychopathic sons. I mean,
the records aren't totally clear - it's not like you can go to
the Thebes County Courthouse and look up the death certificates
on these guys - but it appears that Heracles, backed up by Athena
all the way, personally murders at least half of the Hannibal
Lecterish offspring of Ares.
"So insofar as Athena is a goddess of
war, what really do we mean by that? Note that her most famous
weapon is not her sword but her shield Aegis, and Aegis has a
gorgon's head on it, so that anyone who attacks her is in serious
danger of being turned to stone. She's always described as being
calm and majestic, neither of which adjectives anyone ever applied
to Ares."

"I don't know, Enoch. Defensive versus
offensive war, maybe?"

"The distinction is overrated. Remember
when I said that Athena got leg-fucked by Hephaestus?"

"It generated a clear internal representation
in my mind."

"As a myth should! Athena/Hephaestus is
sort of an interesting coupling in that he is another technology
god. Metals, metallurgy, and fire were his specialties - the
old fashioned Rust Belt stuff. So, no wonder Athena gave him
a hard-on! After he ejaculated on Athena's thigh, she's all eeeeeyew!
and she wipes it off and throws the rag on the ground, where
it somehow combines with the earth and generates Erichthonius.
You know who Erichthonius was?"

"No."

"One of the first kings of Athens. You
know what he was famous for?"

"Tell me."

"Invented the chariot - and introduced
the use of silver as a currency."

"Oh, Jesus!" Randy clamps his head
between his hands and makes moaning noises, only for a little
while.

"Now in many other mythologies you can
find gods that have parallels with Athena. The Sumerian had Enki,
the Norse had Loki. Loki was an inventor-god, but psychologically
he had more in common with Ares; he was not only the god of technology
but also the god of evil too,the closest thing they had to the
devil. Native Americans had tricksters - creatures full of cunning
- like Coyote and Raven in their mythologies, but they didn't
have technolgy yet, and so they hadn't coupled the Trickster
with Crafts to generate this hybrid Technolgist-god."

"Okay," Randy says, "so obviously
where you're going with this is that there must be some universal
pattern of events that when filtered through the sensory aparatus
and the neural rigs of primitive, superstitious people always
gives rise to internal mental representations that they identify
as gods, heroes, etc."

"Yes. And these can be recognized across
cultures, in the same way that two persons with Root Reps in
their mind might 'recognize' me by comparing notes."

"So, Enoch, you want me to believe that
these gods - which aren't really gods, but it's a nice concise
word - all share certain things in common precisely because the
external reality normally generated them is consistent and universal
across cultures."

"That is right. And in the case of the
Trickster gods the pattern is that cunning people tend to attain
power that un-cunning people don't. And all cultures are fascinated
by this. Some of them, like many Native Amercians, bascically
admire it, but never couple it with technological development.
Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the devil."

"Hence the strange love-hate relationship
that Americans have with hackers."

"That's right."

"Hackers are always complaining about
that journalists cast them as bad guys. But do you think that
this ambivalence is deeper-seated."

"In some cultures. The Vikings - to judge
from their mythology - would instinctively hate hackers. But
something different happened with the Greeks. The Greeks liked
their geeks. That's how we get Athena."

"I'll buy that - but where does the war-goddess
thing comein?"

"Let's face it, Randy, we've all known
guys like Ares. The pattern of human behavior that caused the
internal mental representation known as Areas to appear in the
minds of the ancient Greeks is very much with us today, in the
form of terrorists, serial killers, riots, pogroms, and aggressive
tinhorn dictators who turn out to be military incompetents. And
yet for all their stupidity and incompetence, people like that
can conquer and control large hunks of the world if they are
not resisted."

"You must meet my friend Avi."

"Who is going to fight them off, Randy?"

"I am afraid you are going to say we
are."

"Sometimes it might be other Ares-worshippers,
as when Iran and Iraq went to war and no one cared who won. But
if Ares-worhippers aren't going to end up running the whole world,
someone needs to do violence to them. That isn't very nice, but
it's a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And the only way
to fight the bastards off inthe end is through intelligence.
Cunning. Metis."

"Tactical cunning, like Odysseus and the
Trojan Horse, or -"

"Both that, and technological cunning.
From time to time there is a battle that is out-and-out won by
new technology - like longbows at Crecy. For most of history
those battles happen only every few centuries - you have the
chariot, the compound bow, gunpoweder, ironclad ships, adn so
on. But something happens around, say, the time that the Monitor,
which the Northerners believed to be the only ironclad warship
on earth, just happens to run into the Merrimack, of which
the Southerners believe excatly the same thing, and they pound
the hell out of each other for hours and hours. That's as good
a point as any to identify as the moment when a spectacular rise
in military technology takes off - it's the elbow of the exponential
curve. Now it takes the world's essentially conservative military
establishments a few decades to really comprehend what has happened,
but by the time we're thick in the Second World War, it's accepted
byeveryone who doesn't have his head completely up his ass that
the war's going to be won by whichever side has the best technology.
So on the German side alone we've got rockets, jet aircraft,
nerve gas, wire-guided missiles. And on the Ally side we've got
three vast efforts that put basically every top-level hacker,
nerd, and geek to work: the Manhattan Project, which gave us
nuclear weapons; and the Radiation Lab, which gave us the modern
electronics industry. Do you know why we won the Second World
War, Randy?"

"I think you just told me."

"Because we built better stuff than the
Germans?"

"Isn't that what you said?"

"But why did we build better stuff, Randy?"

"I guess I'm not competent to answer,
Enoch, I haven't studied that period well enough."

"Well the short answer is that we won
because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena."

"And am I suppose to gatehr that you,
or your organization, had something to do with that?"

"Oh, come now, Randy! Let's not allow
this to degenerate into conspiracy theories."